Chinese Internet

An article written April 12, 2012 in The Guardian, explains that there is a lot of speculations over the cut of all foreign websites for an hour long that evening. Apparently this was an hour of government officials testing how they can strengthen their censorship, leaving many Chinese citizens worried. While they were encouraged to believe it was just a failure in the internet, an executive at the Data Center for China released a blog urging people to think otherwise. Apparently this is all to branch out the "great firewall" that is overtaking China. The ministry of information technology said it was to investigate the situation but many are still concerned with the lack of information that average citizens have access to. Many people are worried that their government is in too much control of their everyday lives and what information they'll be able to access in the near future. With all the filters the "great firewall" of china has put on its citizens, bloggers are begging to think they might be soon disconnected from the world.

Another article I read that was posted only hours ago. This one discussed the recent attack that china has had on its own citizens, by arresting more than 6000 people. They didnt stop there, after deleting Sina Wiebo (China's modern day facebook) by deleting almost every opinionated comment, they went through and censored several more social media websites. This article focuses the attention on how this might backfire for china. With its  more than 500million  users and its online retail value to be set to be $364 billion by 2015, censoring their internet, could mean putting an end on their central market. It also brings up the point that the Foreign Direct Investors will start to dramatically decrease if China censors the information they have access to before investing with them. China's fears should include, the thousands of money spend on closing down the internet as well as how its disrupting the innovation of the internet.

The third article I read, discussed an event on April 3,2011 a very inspiration Chinese artist named Ai WeiWei was sent to jail for his attempting to create the arab styled revolution protests. The government released him but this action served to show the other citizens how much control China really has over its country. However, this isn't stopping WeiWei and his supporters who claim that the they are now "behind" in the generation due to the censorship on the internet in China. Current citizens dont even have access to popular sites including twitter and facebook. They believe free discussion could lead to corruption of the country. That is why the government either hides or deletes potential controversial information for its citizens, leaving them in a bubble.

The last article I read is quite interesting because it gives the opinions of Googles co-founder Sergey Brin. In this article it shows how Brin goes from having such confidence that the Chinese government couldnt censor the internet to fear as to how much control they have. The fear comes from the limitations that China has been able to restrict, meaning they are slowly changing the innovation of the internet.
His fear includes the support other countries might feel by China's actions. With Googles international market, there is a lot on the line by having too much censored.